Exchange - Move , Migrate and Cluster

[netwalker1]

Dear All :
We faced a critical problem last week with our Exchange 2000 Server – as the server it self faced a hardware problem and all the email functionality in our company stopped ! Everything is back to normal after about 7 hours - So We are thinking to move the exchange server to clustered system ..
Also while we are moving the server we are thinking to migrate it to 2003 – and to complete the task we think to make a front-end and back-end to it to secure and protect the emailing system …

Any advises ? and ideas ?


Mohamed Farid
[green]Know Me No Pain , No Me Know Pain !!![/green]

 

[Zelandakh]

Yes.
Cluster - REALLY bad idea. REALLY, REALLY bad idea. Unless you happen to be the top Exchange server guy within 1,000 miles, do NOT go for a cluster.
Front end / back end. Only really useful for additional horse power where you have more than about 500 users.
Exchange 2003. That's a given.

The real benefit is the hardware. Get a dual processor (given), 4GB RAM (given), hot swap power, hot swap disks, hot swap anything. Think about IOPS and get spindles to cope with it.

Spend the money on the hardware and thank yourself downstream. Get it professionally installed and thank yourself downstream. Ignore clustering. The only good cluster is an inactive / passive one.

 

[58sniper]

Yep - I'm with Zelandakh on this one. Clustering is not cost effective. You're getting really nothing out of it except some protection against a motherboard failure.

Yes, you should go to 2003 - for a lot of reasons.

You don't mention the extent of the downtime and what really caused it, so we can't recommend how to avoid that in the future. But if you put Exchange on a healthy box, spec'd out correctly, and properly managed, you're not likely to have 7 hours of downtime again. Heck, even if one of my Dell's goes down, the Dell guy is standing in my office with a new part in a couple of hours.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[bigtoga]

If you need some help migrating from 2000 to 2003, these guys have a whole series of downloadable videos that show you how to do it -

http://www.learnexchange.com/VideoT...-8-videos-Exchange-2000-to-Exchange-2003.aspx